America’s Future Doomed by Climate (circa 1778)

A domestic weather-station: combined thermometer, hygrometer, and barometer. Engraving after B. Martin. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

In the 1770s, the greatest naturalist in the Western World, the French scientist George Louis Leclerc, comte du Buffon—echoed by many others viewed as the leading scientific authorities of the era—insisted that beyond doubt America’s natural environment was deleterious to all animal life.